AI’s lack of personality, the driver role in scoring the Best Fleets to Drive For winners, and tips for better communication

The CarriersEdge Podcast | Episode #116

Jane Jazrawy: Hey. Welcome to Episode 116. Of The CarriersEdge podcast. I'm Jane Jazrawy, a co-founder of CarriersEdge, and "fill in the blank."

Mark Murrell: I am Mark Murrell, co-founder of CarriersEdge. "Blank filled in."

Jane: It's Mad Libs.

Mark: Mad Libs. Alright.

Jane: Remember those? Oh, you may not have— I don't think Mad Libs were a thing when we were kids. No. So when I was teaching, they were.

Mark: Yeah. They kinda came after.

Jane: Yeah. Which is basically filling the blanks of all these little page of story, but it has a whole bunch of blanks in it, and you can be silly.

Mark: Yes. Fill it in with funny.

Jane: Yes.

Mark: Whitticisms.

Jane: I'm sure that it's been integrated into some sort of training thing that I don't know about.

Mark: Yeah. It's now being used to train AIs.

Jane: Yeah. Mad Lips. Yes. No. AI is way too pedantic and boring.
And I find that AI has a personality of good-natured boring.

Mark: Good-natured boring.

Jane: That's what I find when AI wants to talk to me at some point, it's— and even the voiceover, so you can do some voiceover with AI. We don't, because it is good-natured boring. But it's always kind of this generic, hey, this is the information that you wanted, and we are going to talk about it and but not really having any feeling about it. But just, you know, good-natured.

Mark: I feel like it's kind of got a very sleepy but posh British accent.

Jane: Oh, really?

Mark: Well, not like posh like you should listen to it, but like that kind of sleepy, not very energetic. Like a super old British person.
Oh—your grandfather. Maybe that's who I'm interested in.
Oh, I only knew him when he was super old.

Jane: Yeah. But that is kind of the same thing. It's like this good-natured, gentle information.
Yeah. Boring.

Mark: Is it tea time yet?

Jane: It is tea time. Yeah.
So, I think what we're gonna end up finding with AI is that it's boring.
It doesn't have any personality.
And you can't get your personality off the internet—as we all know.

Mark: I love that. You can't get your personality off the internet.

Jane: But like, think about it.

Mark: You have to develop your personality from the real world.

Jane: Yeah. You have to develop a personality that is, you know, your own unique thing that is, you know, maybe not totally unique, but you get it from a whole bunch of different variables that only you have. And so your personality, you know, your anxieties, your strengths, your whatever, it's very one-of-a-kind. Well, we like think that. And so how is AI going to develop that?
And maybe AI just hasn't developed enough. But what I find is that it's just super boring. Even the images that I'm seeing now on the Internet, like on Facebook and things like that, where people are trying to do political cartoons and things like that. You just look at it and go, well, that's— yeah... I can tell that's AI and that's boring.

Mark: Yeah.

Jane: That's not very good.

Mark: Yeah. There's no grit to it.

Jane: There's a lot of—

Mark: Yeah. No. That's interesting. That's a really good point.

Jane: And I think that's what—when people say, "Well, why don't you just use AI?"—that’s gonna be my answer now. Is that really what you want? You wanna listen to AI?

I have listened—and here’s where I’m coming from. I have an account on Substack, which is like another kind of social media thing, but it’s where all journalists go to die. And they have their second career on Substack, and they say all the things that they wanna say that whatever publication or network didn’t want them to—or they got fired or they left or whatever.

And I can click— for some of the articles, I can hit a play button and AI will read it to me instead of me reading it myself. And I don’t like to do it very much because I like the physical act of reading. But when I’m washing the dishes or doing something with my hands, I can’t always do that, so I hit play. And it is that very nice little thing of, "I am telling you these terrible things in this article that have happened, but I am still saying it in this very nice voice."

And I think that’s where I’m getting this from, because I’ve listened to a bunch of these things over the last couple of weeks and thinking, "Wow. This is boring."

Mark: Well, it’s funny because you said— you suggested, "Get AI to do your voiceover, get AI to do it." Anytime I hear somebody saying, "Why don’t you get AI to do it?" what I’m actually hearing—and I don’t think this is conscious, I think it’s sort of a subconscious substitution that’s happened in my head—what I’m hearing is, "I’m lazy. Why don’t you be lazy, too?"

Because "get AI to do it" is just code for lazy. Do a sloppy, garbage job.

Jane: Yeah. That you don’t have to pay for. It’s free.

Mark: Mhmm.

Jane: But free is mediocre.

Mark: Yeah.

Jane: Free is always mediocre.

Mark: Yeah.

Jane: It is a mediocre experience.

Mark: Now, on the one hand, I can kind of see why voiceover people are very worried about AI. Because there are a lot of situations right now where people are going to the free-but-crappy AI instead of paying for quality. I think there will always be a market for quality. And you can absolutely tell the difference between something that was done cheaply by AI and something where they spent money to pay a real person to do it.

And you see it on TV ads. There’s AI and voiceover on TV ads, and it’s immediately apparent.

Jane: It’s the same with stock images. And I use stock images all the time.

Mark: Yeah. But you're not using the same ones that everybody is using.

Jane: Well, we use them very differently.

Most people use stock photography to do an ad. So you want a driver in front of a truck—there’s your ad. Your happy driver in front of the truck.

The problem is that other people use the same image.

Mark: There’s only ten of those pictures, and everybody is using them.

Jane: There’s more now. Like, there’s more women, there’s more men, minorities and stuff.

Mark: There’s ten of "happy driver behind the wheel" when there used to be one.

Jane: Yes.

Mark: But now everybody is using the other nine. Because there was one that was there that everybody used forever—and we all know what these pictures are. You can all envision them.

But now there’s nine more variations. And yes, it’s a happy woman driver in a blue plaid shirt, dark-haired woman, blonde woman, blondish, sort of wavy-haired woman. There’s mildly Hispanic kind of looking driver in a brown shirt. There’s the regular white driver behind the wheel.

But yeah, we all know what they all are, and they’re all so cliché now.

Jane: Well, there is—what I noticed—there is one time we were using a bunch of drivers, and I can’t remember—we were using that stock for something. It wasn’t for a course. It might have been for—I was looking for them for some sort of ad campaign or a series of things. And when I looked at them all, I was like, "Hey, wait a minute. They’re all in plaid!"

Everybody’s in plaid. I’m like, drivers don’t just wear plaid.

Mark: Yeah.

Jane: Like, stop with the stereotypical. You know— yeah, maybe a ball cap, like a hat—

Mark: Yeah.

Jane: And those hats are very common. But plaid is not the universal uniform of a driver at all. And yet, stock has decided—because the people in the stock images are not drivers, and the people taking the photographs are not drivers either. They don’t have anything to do with trucking. So they think, "Oh, I need to do some driver and truck pictures. What should I... oh, what should I wear for this shoot, Mr. Photographer?"

"Oh, put on some—do you have a plaid shirt?"

Mark: And a lot of layers. Like a T-shirt, with an open plaid shirt, with a vest, and then like another jacket.

Jane: Layers are fine. But sometimes you’re wearing a T-shirt, sometimes you’re wearing a jacket—

Mark: And more of them are wearing a regular reflective vest.

Jane: I know! That’s the other thing. The only stock photography you can get—well, most of it—is with people who— if you’re wearing a reflective vest, you’re also wearing a helmet.

So you can only wear a reflective vest if you wear the hard hat.

Mark: There’s a lot of truck drivers that wear hard hats.

Jane: All the time—in the truck. Yes. There is a use for it, but you have to be careful with it. You can’t just slap it in. That’s what people make the mistake of with AI—is that you're just getting to use AI and— I'm not going to think about it anymore. I just slap it in.

It’s the same with stock photography. Yes, if you don’t take your own pictures, it's easier— well, I don’t know. I think taking your own pictures is easier. But if you don’t think it is and you’re going to use just stock, it’s better to think about what you’re doing. If they’re all wearing plaid, change some of the colors. That’s what I did. Whatever I was doing, I just changed the shirts. And I used AI for that.

Mark: That sounds like something that's useful. But you’re not saying, “Give me a picture of a truck driver wearing this and this.” You’re taking an existing picture that works and saying, “In this specific area, change this.” It’s more surgical.

Jane: Yeah. Unfortunately, Adobe Photoshop, when you ask it to do that, often adds things you didn’t ask for—and we talked about—like, an extra head.

Mark: Mhmm. So you get the plaid shirt removed and changed the way you want, but they also add a third arm.

Jane: No, they just change the person. They have a whole different person that you didn't ask for. And they say, select the area that you wanna change so it's going to be more exact, you know, dutifully select the shirt. And unless I put in the exact right combination of words, I get— you know, I start off with a Black woman and then I end up with a white man. And then they're all alike. And every time I do it, they look weirder. They start looking like really— their faces are kind of distorted and warped. It’s strange.

Mark: Let the record show that Jane is making a lot of hand motions right now.

Jane: Yeah, I'm making hand motions.

Mark: Gesturing. So that everyone can see.

Jane: Can you see this?

Mark: Yes.

Jane: We need to have photos or video that goes with our podcast so people can see all my hand gestures.

Mark: But then we’d have to be dressed and upright and all that kind of stuff.

Jane: You make it sound like we’re doing this in pajamas.

Mark: Yeah. Maybe we’d have to dress appropriately.

Jane: Yeah, I would not wear what I’m usually wearing.

Mark: This wasn’t even what I planned to talk about, but it was a great side quest. Our periodic rant about the state of AI—which is getting better, but slowly.

Jane: I think the biggest improvement will come when we focus on what we use it for. Start finding where it’s actually good for us, and not just trying to cheat you out of some— or trying to scam you out of money— or have naked photos of you, or the stupid things that people do.

Mark: Yeah, the criminal element immediately jumps onto it. But there’s something else it gets used for, and I'm going to use it to pivot into something that we are going to talk about. We want to talk about this. I'm pivoting.

Jane: Pivot! Mark is physically pivoting.

Mark: Now we’re going to talk about how people use AI to interact with drivers. It’s generally bad.

Jane: But I think we’ve mentioned this before…

Mark: Well, this is bringing me around to a subject that we were going to talk about on the last podcast and didn’t—because I completely forgot about it. We talked about it before we started recording.

Usually, what happens? We start prepping for this thing like five minutes before we hit record. We kind of run through a few things we want to talk about, then we hit record and see where the conversation goes. And it went. And we were getting to the point where we were sort of at time, and I totally forgot about this whole other thing we wanted to talk about.

Jane: And you were doing that thing where you don’t want to talk anymore.

Mark: Well, we’d hit time. I think we had other things booked afterwards. There were other crunches happening.

Jane: So it's like, okay—so Mark justifies he just didn’t want to do it anymore.

Mark: I forgot! I don’t know. If I had remembered, we had space. We could have done another ten minutes on that episode. It would’ve been okay. But I totally forgot about it.

Jane: Well, what is it? What is this magical thing we were going to speak of?

Mark: I will tell you after two more commercial breaks.

Jane: What was the Seinfeld thing—he said it was his favorite show?

Mark: Oh, the Flex Seal.

Jane: Flex Seal. The Flex Seal ad is his favorite show. We saw Seinfeld.

Mark: No. You're really digressing.

Jane: Well, you said, “doing ads.” Oh, Flex Seal!

Mark: Joking. But yes. Flex Seal apparently is awesome.

So what we were going to talk about—that I totally forgot about—was drivers complaining, and what we do about it. Now, drivers complaining—everyone listening is rolling their eyes because they have to deal with it on a regular basis. Totally understand it. We have no drivers that we employ, but yet we still have drivers complaining that we have to deal with periodically.

Mostly, I think what you wanted to talk about was in the context of the Best Fleets program.

Jane: Mhmm.

Mark: In the Best Fleets to Drive For program, we put out our winners. We announce the Top 20, Hall of Fame, overall winners. Every year, there are drivers on the internet who take issue with the winners. Many times, they’ve never worked for any of these companies—they still have an issue with them. They still have opinions on them.

So you wanted to talk a little bit about that—the experience of what we deal with, how we deal with it, and how we approach that.

Jane: We get new people complaining every year. And I don’t want to say “complaining”—it feels like complaining to us, but it really isn’t, because people have concerns.

Mark: It’s an attempt to educate us.

Jane: Yes. I think that’s why I feel like it’s complaining, but it is an attempt to educate us—that the fleet that was either the overall winner or a member of the Best Fleets is not a good fleet at all.

Mark: Mmm.

Jane: Even though we've gone through this whole process of— and funnily enough, one of the messages that I got recently was, "I don't know how you select them, but..."

Mark: Yeah. That’s what prompted this—that message that came into the Best Fleets support mailbox—

Jane: Yeah.

Mark: —explaining about how this company wasn't really a good company.

Jane: Yeah. "I don't know how you would do that evaluation, but—"

Mark: And we've scratched our heads thinking, okay, to get to this email address, you most likely went to the Best Fleets website—which details quite extensively how we determine these winners. We have blog stories, we have the results book where we explain it. It’s not really a mystery.

Jane: I think that what we need to do is a video—about how we do it, how it’s selected. There are some people who, unless there’s a video... nobody... they’re just not reading it.

Mark: Like a flowchart. And we do like an old-style prof or a scientist—with a lab coat, with a pointer, pointing at the different points of the flowchart.

Jane: Of the flowchart? Yeah. I think that we could just do it as a little chat. Or maybe direct it to drivers who want to know more about the program.

Mark: Yeah. So, one of those explainer videos.

Jane: Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Well, I don’t wanna do an explainer video because I think they’re overdone.

Mark: Okay.

Jane: I don’t like those whiteboard things anymore. I mean, I thought they were kinda cute for about a year, and then I was like, okay, we’re good now. We don’t need any more of these ever again. It’s much like—I’m starting to feel like the AI thing.

Mark: Yeah.

Jane: Where it’s like, okay. This is not good. So, what I think is really interesting is that if you don’t agree with somebody—or with a result—I think it’s a really interesting approach to just say, “Well, I don’t agree.”

Mark: You got it wrong.

Jane: Yeah. It's you're wrong.

Mark: Yeah. Start with no questions at all. Start with just a statement.

Jane: And that's what always happens. It's a statement. It's like, “You're wrong. This fleet is not a Best Fleet. They're terrible.” And then they usually go on to detail how terrible the fleet is. And I would say that every single company that has been in existence for more than five years has somebody who's going to tell you exactly why that place is a terrible place to work.

Mark: I'm gonna disagree with you on one point there. It doesn't take five years. Two years in, some driver that used to work for that company is gonna tell you why they're the worst thing ever.

Jane: I'm gonna say any company anywhere. That’s why I went to five.

Mark: Okay. Any company anywhere.

Jane: Yes. Somebody is gonna hate you. Always.

Mark: Yeah. We know that for sure.

Jane: Oh, yeah. Because we hate companies. People hate us.

Mark: I think a lot of it in trucking is a mismatch on hiring. The wrong people in the wrong jobs. And they may be a perfectly fine driver somewhere else. And it may be a company that is great. All companies are great for some people—and terrible for others.

Jane: Yes.

Mark: And if you've got that wrong mix—square peg, round hole—it’s not gonna work well.

Jane: One of the things that Best Fleets is for is for companies to try and minimize the number of people who are gonna say, “This is a terrible company.” It really is—someone is always gonna hate you.

Mark: Yeah.

Jane: Because somebody will fall through the cracks or, like you said, kind of be mishired—not like the way they were treated randomly by somebody who didn’t mean it. It could be, you know, completely unintentional and somebody is just upset. Or things that you have to do as a company—as management—that people are just not gonna like, and you're gonna have to just deal with it. You know, if you wanna change your hiring strategy and a whole bunch of people don’t fit anymore, but they wanna come back—they left and they wanna come back—but, oh no, you don’t, you know, fit the hiring criteria anymore or whatever, then they get all mad and you're the worst thing ever. When drivers send us messages and say, “You know, this fleet is terrible,” it really tells us why.

Mark: Right. Well, they will explain it—sometimes in a way that kind of begs more questions.

Jane: Yes.

Mark: It's like, there’s gonna be some griping about how “they didn’t pay me” or “they stiffed me on this.” It’s almost always about some pay discrepancy, which is like the number one issue. Drivers do not understand their pay. Companies—you mentioned Best Fleets being about minimizing that, but it’s also about helping companies figure out where those particular choke points are so that they can identify them and resolve them before it becomes—or eliminate—those problems. And we go through a lot of that evaluation, and we score them on that. And we get the driver surveys to compare, you know, what drivers think about different things, and give them a lot of details that they can use to figure out where there are potential problem areas—pitfalls, opportunities for that sort of miscommunication or conflict to arise—and then proactively eliminate that. And the smart companies do that. They get their reports, they look at the results book, they think about what they’re doing, and they continue to improve on all of that. But for the driver that was kind of spit out the back end of that broken process, they still think, “Oh, this is a terrible place.”

Jane: But there’s other places where they get these ideas. Prime is one of the companies that constantly we get—

Mark: Mhmm.

Jane: You know, “Why is Prime on this list? Prime’s terrible. Prime’s awful.” I think a lot of the drivers who say that never worked for Prime.

Mark: Yeah.

Jane: It's all like rumor mill. There are people who legitimately—legitimately—have a gripe with Prime. Fine. And we offer the chance—and this is not just Prime, I’m just saying that Prime gets it quite a bit.

Mark: Yeah.

Jane: But other fleets also get it.

Mark: Larger fleets get a lot of it.

Jane: Larger—yes. If you're a larger fleet, you're absolutely gonna get someone who hates you. And I’ve actually talked to people at Prime about this. And, you know, we know that they have, like, ten thousand drivers. Someone's gonna hate you.

Mark: There could be some people that aren’t happy there.

Jane: But sometimes it's rumor mill. Or it's something that happened, like, thirty years ago, and nobody who actually was responsible is even there anymore.

Mark: Or it led to them completely changing a whole series of processes.

Jane: Exactly.

Mark: You can't change what happened, but you can do something about it. Right? So sometimes, you're right—sometimes these drivers have legitimate concerns. Sometimes they have an issue that is— that’s a real issue.

Okay. What did you do with that? Sometimes they have a really good story about what they did with it.

Jane: The other thing is that there are people who have their own podcasts—usually video—where they talk about how the Best Fleets is a lot of crap. And they talk about fleets that shouldn’t be on the list because they were, you know, of x, y, and z, and that it’s all just—you know—it’s all just made up.

Mark: When they all present this as if it’s an established, accepted fact. That’s how they—either they have no qualification, no backup for any of these statements, but they’ll assert it as if it’s understood, as accepted fact. “You know, well, they’re known for ripping off their drivers. They’re well known for running overtime and running bad equipment.” Where’s the evidence for this?

Jane: Exactly.

Mark: Do you have some data that you can provide to back it up?

Jane: I think that—I mean, I don’t think it’s rampant—but I have seen them. And it always makes me angry because we do work so hard to really evaluate companies. And if drivers were part of those evaluations, then they would see it. I would love to have drivers actually be part of the evaluating—like, see what we do. See how we do scoring.

Well, they would get very bored.

Mark: Yeah.

Jane: It’s not exciting. It’s like the LTL guy—it’s boring. Because it’s repetitive and you have to keep checking your own work. It’s like writing a freaking essay. So it’s almost a knee-jerk thing—if you hate a company (and everybody hates companies, I have companies I hate too), you have a knee-jerk reaction to anyone getting an award. It’s like, How did you get one? No, you don’t want the best for these people. You want the worst.

Mark: But now you’ve also opened the can of worms of these YouTubers, or these Instagram and TikTok people that are doing some of these things. And some of them are motivated to make those kinds of statements because that’s how they get likes. That’s how they get clicks. Stirring it up gets them more views. I’ve attempted to engage with some of these in the past when they’ve mentioned us. There was one podcaster—a trucker podcaster—who just said Best Fleets to Drive For is “pay to play.” “It’s all big companies that are paying to get on the list.”

Jane: Ugh.

Mark: And I’m thinking—have you even looked at the list? Most of these companies are not very big. Some of them are tiny. What do you mean it’s pay to play? So I attempted to engage with this person and say, “We have a very methodical process, I’d love to explain it to you.” Crickets.

Jane: Oh yeah. They don’t want to—they don’t care about any of that. They only care about what’s gonna get everybody mad because that’s gonna increase engagement somehow. Which I think is a failure of human beings—that for some reason being angry or afraid is the only way to engage.

Mark: Mmm.

Jane: You can’t engage based on... I guess it’s like eating your vegetables. People don’t wanna do it. People wanna eat the garbage. And they wanna feed their brains garbage too. You know, that’s their choice.

Mark: Well, as far as what we do about it—that’s kind of an interesting thing. Because what we’re sort of dancing around here is that we do take these seriously. Every time they come in, we do look at them. We try to explore if there’s a legitimate issue there. And we are always watching for indications that somebody isn’t who they say they are.

We don’t go to these fleets and live there for three months, right? We don’t embed ourselves in the company and work there for months on end. So we do have to take it a little bit of faith. We have to interview the companies, look at what they’re telling us, follow up with questions, talk to their— get their driver surveys, virtually talk to their drivers, compare all of these things, and from that, establish a picture of the company.

It’s not perfect. It’s never going to be perfect. I would argue that we do it better than any other award in the industry because we’ve got that methodical approach—and it isn’t just “who writes a nice essay.”

We've got that detail. We follow up. We check if their story is consistent. We look for major changes year over year to see if something is more believable. We’ve got a much more methodical process on all of that, and we look at the driver surveys. Plus, we’ve got many, many years of experience doing this and knowing what to watch for.

It will never be perfect, but I think it’s a pretty good process. And I’m pretty happy with it.

I’ve yet to find any other recognition program that has any kind of depth that matches ours—and most of them don’t even tell you how they choose the winners anyway. There’s no transparency at all. So we at least explain why. We think these companies are the winners. And here are the things they’re doing that you might be able to learn from.

So I stand by our process. But every time a driver does send us some complaint or post some comment about it—we do look into it. We do consider it. We do have to go through that whole process.

Jane: Sometimes it’s— you know, if people are claiming, “I don’t know how you choose them,” the only thing we can do is say, “Well, this is the process. This is how we choose them.” It’s not a mystery. It’s not coming from the atmosphere.

What I often talk to people about is: driver surveys make a difference.

Mark: Yes.

Jane: Driver surveys absolutely make a difference. If that fleet is so bad—you cannot get into the Top 20 without getting a significant percentage of your drivers to agree. Drivers can basically tank a company—

Mark: Oh yeah.

Jane: —if that’s how it generally feels. And we’ve seen companies’ driver satisfaction go down.

Mark: Oh, absolutely.

Jane: We’ve seen driver satisfaction be a major part of why a fleet doesn’t get back into the Top 20—or doesn’t get in at all.

Mark: Yeah. We’ve seen that over the years—companies that have been in the Top 20 where drivers’ sentiment dropped significantly. And it may not take them all the way out of the Top 20, but it can knock them down quite a ways.

Jane: Oh yeah.

Mark: And I think there have been times where driver satisfaction did knock them out of the Top 20. Absolutely. Or, we’re going through the scoring, thinking, “Wow, they’re doing pretty well, they’re likely to make the Top 20,” and then the driver surveys come along—and that just kills their chances.

Jane: Yeah, because the driver surveys don’t match what they’re saying. And that is a really, really important part of it: does everything line up?

We have different metrics that are completely separate. We have the driver survey, with questions on it that are related—but they’re not the same questions. We have the interview. We have the questionnaire.

And the interview is almost a different animal than the questionnaire, because in the interview, you get all kinds of—you get a feeling. You get a lot of stuff.

Mark: A lot about stuff in the first two minutes of that interview.

Jane: Yeah. Or even just scheduling the interview—we’ve talked about that before. You know, if you’ve ever dealt with a company that’s hard to deal with, you get frustrated. That happens in Best Fleets, where you can’t get a hold of people, or they don’t—

Mark: —or they book the interview at the last minute.

Jane: Yeah.

Mark: —to try and squeeze it in. While they’re telling you they’ve got this wonderful open-door policy and anybody can get to them anytime, you're like— you couldn’t even schedule an interview. How are you having time for a driver? You couldn't schedule an interview with me for something that you want from me. How are you gonna try and convince me that you're making time for drivers to come in and tell you about problems? It just doesn't add up.

Jane: Or you have companies that don’t think there’s any room to improve. They think they should just be on the list because they’re in there.

Mark: Yes.

Jane: And there’s a lot of that. And you think, what must it be like for a driver to be working for you? The companies in the Top 20 have done a lot of work. You may not like it, but they have enough people who like it that they can get on the list.

The other thing is, there’s always this in the back of our minds when companies have people complaining about them. It is, like you said, in the large part it’s the large companies. Smaller companies almost never have anybody. And I think it’s just a matter of the number of people.

Mark: One of the things that’s come up in the past, which I find interesting, is people saying, “Well, it’s not really drivers doing the survey. Office staff are doing the survey as well.” And that’s something we look at.

Because it’s supposed to be a driver survey, drivers giving their opinions. In theory, it should be very black and white: if any office person is typing anything into that survey, it’s invalidated right away—it’s a disqualifier.

But trucking doesn't work like that. Trucking has a lot of people who want to do the survey, but they don’t want to type. They want to do it while they’re out on the road. They don’t like computers, they don’t want to use a phone for it.

So we regularly see drivers and office staff sitting together, and the driver will dictate comments to the office staff. Sometimes they do it over the phone. They’ll call in and say, “I want to do this thing,” and the dispatcher, fleet manager, HR—whomever—is typing in the driver’s answers.

We have ways of telling when it’s an actual driver versus somebody who’s a non-driver. The kind of things they say, the way they say it—even people who used to be drivers and now work in an office, they say things very differently in the surveys than actual drivers do.

And we’ve had that in the past. We’ve had people trying to skew the results by having office staff throw in a whole bunch of positive surveys. We can tell those things. We can determine which ones are legitimate driver surveys and which ones aren’t.

If there’s just a few—okay. Especially in larger companies, you’ll get some overzealous people who try to do something. We just pull those out. They don’t count in the numbers, and they’ve got to fill in with real drivers.

But every once in a while, you get somebody who goes a little too far, and we have to deal with it. And we’ve had that in the past. We’ve had a number of things like that.

And part of it is—people are never as smart as a spy movie would make you think they are. Or some caper movie. You know, those Ocean’s Eleven kinds of great cappery of robbery that's so slick that nobody sees it. In the real world, nobody’s that slick.

It’s always really easy to see where the problems are. And if you’re looking for it—especially if you’ve been through it enough times—you start seeing a bit of this, a bit of that, and all of these other things.

You see all kinds of things, and it’s really easy to tell which ones are legitimate and which ones aren’t.

And what’s also funny is people will say, “They’re not getting their drivers. They’re just stuffing the ballot box.” "They’re stuffing the surveys with a bunch of people saying positive things about them." And then we go look at the surveys—and they’ve got, like, an 80% satisfaction rate. So they’ve still got a bunch of people who are really dissatisfied with things.

So where’s the ballot box stuffing there? You’ve still got people saying negative things.

Jane: Yeah. I do— I know that people get drivers an orientation to do it.

Mark: Yeah. Which doesn't help them. It's a dumb idea because it doesn't help you at all.

Jane: No. Because they are gonna be really wishy-washy.

Mark: Right.

Jane: And also, it's going to like, don't forget, the driver survey is not the whole thing. Yeah. That's only part of it. Yeah. There's other indicators that we can see.
So that interview and that questionnaire, get a very good sense of what's happening at that company or how people are interacting with each other. Because we ask questions that are not on the questionnaire.

Mark: We have follow-up questions.

Jane: Yeah. We ask to, you know, explain that. How does this work? Why do you do it that way? You know, what did drivers think about that?

Mark: Yeah. What prompted you to start doing that? Yeah. We have a lot of good probing questions. But, yes, your point about the survey being only one part of it is really important because we've seen fleets that have, like, 99.5% satisfaction. Still don't make the list. They're not doing anything. If you have happy people, but you're not making any effort, you just got lucky that you found the right batch of people.

Jane: Or you stuffed the ballot box.

Mark: Or you stuffed the ballot box, then, yeah, you don't really get anywhere because you're not making any effort. It's only one part of the puzzle.

Jane: And you have to keep changing. Like, you can't just keep doing the same thing.

Mark: Yeah. You have to keep moving.

Jane: I think that the emphasis is on how to become a Best Fleet is really talk to your drivers about what they want. As you're doing it, include your drivers and make sure you follow up with your drivers when a change has been made. So, is there always a communication before, during and after something? Whatever it is, whatever the change is, or whatever new program you're going to do, or even when you just wanna see how a program is going, just have that conversation with people and then respond to it. And when we see that, that is the best fleet, basically. That's kind of it in the nutshell. Do you ask, do you have them involved in whatever it is that you're doing? And do you follow up with them later? And when there's a big change, how do you accommodate for that? What are you doing for your drivers when there's a change that's negative?

Mark: So those are really interesting points that transition us into one of the other things that I wanted to talk about, which is the ATA Safety, Security, and Human Resources Conference that I was at last week.

Jane: Well, that seems like a big stretch, but you can connect them?

Mark: There's two things that you said that immediately made me think of sessions. One of them is the communicating with drivers about changes and communicating that part of it reminded me of one of the sessions that they had that was about communication strategies for different generations. It was like how to communicate, how to resonate with different generations.

And one of the speakers was talking about approaching it from a place of questions. And she had a slightly different language: I'm going to come at it with questions rather than making assertions about people, rather than making statements. It’s coming at it and saying, well, What makes you say that? Or, Why do you think that? So start every communication, you know, when you got complaining drivers, you have issues, start with questions rather than immediately sort of rebutting and defending it. And it works a whole lot better. It was a really good session. Unfortunately, I had to leave before it ended, but it was a really good session. So reinforcing what you were just saying about the importance of communication.

And another one was on change management, on safety technology—a topic that we love because we've talked about it here a few times—and they're talking about engaging drivers and the importance of communicating with drivers what's happening, but also not just sort of beforehand. Here's what we're planning to do. Here's the rollout. Like, all of those kinds of things are good. And people are starting to get a lot better about that. Getting a lot better about having pilot programs for new technology and getting drivers involved. But keep it going after the fact so that the drivers can see the benefits and highlight—I thought this was a really good idea—highlight the value that you're seeing from this new thing that you're trying.

So we've got this new safety technology. We've got it rolled out. Everybody's used to it. But that's not the end of the communication. Then down the road, it is "Here's what we've been able to do because of this." "So through your involvement, because everybody has bought into this, you've been really active with the success of this thing, now we're able to do this." Or "We've got our safety record improved," or "Out-of-service is down"—whatever the thing is that you're looking for. Make sure you continue to communicate those wins and try and do it in a positive way.

And so this is another one—I get to give a shout-out to Mike Glasgow at Boyle Transportation, who made the mistake of telling me that he listens to this podcast. But this was a session where he was speaking, and he was talking about framing all of these things in positives. So even when you're talking about reducing crashes or reducing accidents, you're still talking about a negative. With the crash or with the out-of-service or whatever the violation is—framing it in a positive works a lot better. You can say, Here's some positive thing that this person did. Or, you know, This person—I don’t know—was a 120% of target in this area, and they did so well because of this, and you frame these things as a positive, and it works a lot better. I thought that was a really nice way of approaching it.

Jane: Yeah. I remember, Mike, having a comment on one of our courses. And I think it was not— It was Leadership Skills, maybe Leadership Styles.

Mark: He made a comment. Yeah. He told me again about how much you like that course.

Jane: And the compliment sandwich?

Mark: Oh, yes. Oh, that's right.

Jane: Yes. That was a— oh, there was another call because it was during the Best Fleets interview, I think. And there was somebody that was— Yeah. And somebody else did not take so kindly to the term compliment sandwich, which was— I'm not gonna tell you the comment because it was a little buffy. It was quite funny, though.

Mark: We can put it in the comments for this when it's posted. We'll put it in the comments with the link to that video because it was pretty funny.

Jane: Was it in a webinar? No. It was a Best Fleets interview.

Mark: Yeah. So we have the link to this example of the compliment sandwich.

Jane: Oh, okay. But it—well, the response to it was—

Mark: Yeah. So the compliment sandwich is when you wanna say something negative to somebody, you wrap it in positive statements. So start with something positive, give them the complaint or whatever it is that you don't like, you want them to change, then have something positive at the end.

Jane: Yeah.

Mark: And there was a very funny video that explained—

Jane: Oh, that one. Oh, okay. No. I thought you meant the Best—like, the actual recording of the interview where it had—where all the conversation happened.

Mark: Not good to show that.

Jane: No. The compliment sandwich—the YouTube video—that was the—yes. And it—there is profanity in there, I think.

Mark: Oh, yes. There's a lot.

Jane: So, yeah, it's not safe for work. Yeah. Definitely.

Mark: But, yeah, it was—it was good. So, it was a good conference. I got a lot of good insights out of it. It was good to be there again. I haven't been there in many years. I thought the last time I went was 2019, but I actually went and looked at my photos of all of my different events. And it was actually 2017 was the last time I was there—when it was in Memphis. So it's been eight years now—or seven and a half years—because back then they did it pre-COVID, they did it in the fall. So now they've moved it to the spring.

But it was a good—attendance was down a little bit. Unsurprisingly, exhibitors were down a bit as well. Also not a big surprise. But the content was really good. I took a lot of notes at sessions. Most interesting session for me—based on the number of notes I took—was one called Insurance in Crisis. And I don’t know why I'm passing you by this stuff, but they’re really breaking down all of the challenges that the insurance industry is facing and all of the things that they're going through.

I think we'll probably write a blog about it because it does sort of tie into our stuff as well. And it talks about—like—basically, no insurance company wants to hold any risk on their books anymore because they're all getting clobbered by these things. They're getting clobbered by claims, and nuclear verdicts are not good news for them.

Jane: This is the US. Specifically.

Mark: Well, what's funny is it becomes global. They're all public companies and they all have to minimize the risks they're going through—and move all that risk off their books. So where do they move that risk? They move it to a reinsurer, which is typically a global company. And those reinsurers are covering not just trucking, but all kinds of risk everywhere.

So it might be a trucking risk that they're reinsuring, but it might also be that they're getting clobbered by hurricanes, or by California wildfires, or some disaster—some giant flood that's happening in Europe. All of those things roll up to the reinsurer, and that ends up spiking the premiums that the insurance company has to pay for that reinsurance.

And when the insurance company's expenses go up, they pass that along to their insureds. So a trucking company may see their premiums going up because there was a flood in Portugal or a hurricane in Florida. It has nothing to do with trucking or anything to do with their business—but just the general cost of insurance is going up. And causing problems.

Jane: Because there have been so many—well, you know, whether you believe it or not, climate change is a thing. And it's affecting the weather, and it's affecting things like hurricanes and tornadoes and—

Mark: But other major disasters too. If there's a major failure, like a building collapse or something, that ends up being part of the bottom line for a premium increase.

Jane: Depends, I guess, on how big it is and how widespread, and how many people are insured, and what the payouts are going to be. But I can see this problem just becoming more and more—

Mark: They're also talking about product liability lawsuits still being a huge issue. Anytime there's product liability and it becomes a class action, there's a $100 million payout or a half-billion dollar payout. It has nothing to do with trucking, but that's where it hits the insurer—the reinsurer—and it ends up trickling down.

You may have twenty trucks and be just a regional operator in Iowa, but you end up paying for it one way or another.

Jane: I think product liability is a really interesting one, because I think there is a move—or, over the last couple of decades, there's been a move—to get things out fast. And not test them properly or try and cut corners. And now there’s an industry that is basically suing product manufacturers for these issues that you think you can get away with—but you're basically gambling.

Mark: Yeah. It was a really interesting session—one of several interesting sessions at that conference. And it was also good to catch up with not just customers, but some other vendors out there and see what's new—who's got new products, who's exhibiting, and who's not exhibiting, which is like my own personal curiosity bingo.

Jane: Whether people have changed the size of their trade show booths.

Mark: What colors? Everybody is moving away—we've talked before about how everybody had all different colors. Then everybody went to blue, and then everybody seemed to be going to white, and now they're moving to black. So that is the trend.

So next time you go to a conference or a trade show, look at how many booths you see that are decorated with sort of a black theme to their backdrops.

Jane: And now this is coming from the tech industry? This uniformity?

Mark: Yes.

Jane: This is, like, all the cool kids are goth. Yeah. You know, that’s—

Mark: That's what's happening. All the cool kids are goth. Now they all have black booths.

Jane: Exactly. Okay.

Mark: I'm trying to finish it off with Doc Martens on.

Jane: But you remember all the goth kids felt that they were unique.

Mark: Yes.

Jane: And everybody will tell you that they're unique—but they're not. So everybody is kind of in a club, and trucking is all kind of in a club. And tech is all kind of in a club. And tech—in that little Silicon Valley world—they will decide, or some designer (usually one of the big ones) will decide, “Oh, we're gonna do this now.” And everybody will be like, “Oh, oh, that's cool.” And then everybody kinda does this like dominoes—bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

And we always try to do everything completely different. So we're gonna stick with our white.

Mark: Yep.

Jane: And then, you know, when everybody decides that it’s white backgrounds with sparse decorations, then we will go to black.

Mark: Yeah. One fad behind.

Jane: We're always one fad behind. We're not the cool kids.

Mark: Yeah. Let other people figure out all the bleeding edge stuff—and then we’ll come in after, when all the problems are solved.

Jane: We're like the good friends who are in a totally other part of the cafeteria. We're just like the theater kids.

Mark: Yeah.

Jane: We're just hanging around, playing Euchre, minding our own business. We're not picking on anybody. We're not dressed really well. But that's scary, isn't it?

Mark: Hey, Michael's gonna have an issue. “How do we brand ourselves?”

Jane: This is why we are not in charge of marketing anymore.

Mark: Yeah.

Jane: So what else was on your list?

Mark: Well, I've forgotten all of it now.

Jane: Oh, really?

Mark: No. I think those were the main things. And I figured something else would come up—and it did. So I think we've kind of run the gamut. And I know you have other things you have to get to, so I think we can wrap this up for now.

Jane: That sounds good. Have a great day.

Mark: Thanks for listening.